About this title: Lehrer argues in this original book that science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, where the brain is concerned, art got there first. Focusing on a group of artists, Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the human mind that science is only now rediscovering.
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Description: Very Good. 0547085907 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Edition: Illustrated.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780618620104ISBN:0618620109
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Clean and bright. Glued binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 242 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Fine in fine dust jacket. Book and dj as new. No edgewear, markings or creasing. Pages bright and tight. Appears unread. Glued binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 242 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Mariner Books
Date Published: 2008-09-01
ISBN-13:9780547085906ISBN:0547085907
Description: New. New book, in stock and ready for immediate shipment. We ship 6 days a week, generally within 24 hours; single CDs and DVDs upgraded to 1st class! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date Published: 2007-11-01
ISBN-13:9780618620104ISBN:0618620109
Description: Very Good. Tight and bright, pages clear and bright, shelf and edge wear, cocked, corners bumped, corners of dust jacket flaps creased. read more
Description: As New. New and unread advance reading copy, tight and unbroken spine, lovely cover, you'll be thrilled with this book! 100% satisfaction guaranteed! ! ! read more
Edition: First edition-First printing.
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, New York
Date Published: 2008
Description: Fine advance reading copy in stiff, glossy wrappers. Black and white illustrations. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and science writing. 230 pages including notes and bibliography. read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780618620104ISBN:0618620109
Description: Near Fine. Near Fine Dust Jacket. Currently in print for $24.00. NO marks or underlining. This item is IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE. read more
Binding: Audio CD
Publisher: Brilliance Audio on CD Unabridge
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781423374206ISBN:1423374207
Description: New. BRAND NEW! In publisher's original shrink-wrap. Free upgrade to domestic First Class. Professional packaging! Books may have a remainder mark on bottom of text block. read more
"You have no idea how much it pains me to dislike a book that Oliver Sacks hails as brilliant, but dear god, I found this tepid, unproven, and faintly ridiculous in turn. Lehrer never actually proves his thesis - that artists of several kinds anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience by several decades. Instead he describes a neuroscientific discovery and reads back into the work of selected artists a definitive revelation they never sought or articulated - the cause and effect he sees plainly does not match. Worse, he locates those revelations entirely in the Western world - the idea that Walt Whitman understood that the brain and body are mutually dependent in creating our experience of the world and - he intimates - understood it first would likely come as quite a shock to, say, the Buddhists and Hindus of the East who have been exploring the mind-body connection in practice, song, chant, and art for centuries. Similarly, Escouffier made fantastic stock - I am quite convinced of this fact. That Escouffier did so because he understood something about how the brain works rather than because he just thought things tasted better with bouquet garni, however? I'm unconvinced.
There's also some shady science in this text, although I'm not sure if it's because Lehrer is getting the science completely wrong or simply because his writing is imprecise. When talking of Civil War soldiers experiencing phantom limb pain, for example, Lehrer argues that the persistence of pain in no-longer-existent body parts showed that "Since soul is body and body is soul, to lose a part of one's body is to lose a part of one's soul. . . . The mind cannot be extricated from its matter, for mind and matter, these two seemingly opposite substances, are impossibly intertwined." (14-15) I don't question the sentiment, but I do question its applicability to phantom limb pain, which neuroscience has proven to be wholly and irrevocably a matter of the brain acting alone - of over-active cells, of physical memory, all of which can be erased if the brain is tricked into thinking it has a limb again (mirror therapy is used to treat the phantom limb pain of amputees returning from Afghanistan and Iraq). Similarly, he writes that early 19th century scientist LaPlace "knew that two astronomers plotting the orbit of the same planet at the same time would differ reliably in their data. The fault was not in the stars, but in ourselves." Yet we know, thanks to quantum physics, that two astronomers plotting the orbit of the same planet can differ reliably in their data because time does not move in all places and at all times at the same pace. Is Lehrer claiming only that LaPlace put things down to human error, or that we still consider ourselves to be the problem, and not the stars (and, clearly, not the space-time continuum, which is the real issue).
I am no scientist - all of this knowledge is gleaned from a somewhat obsessive love of the science articles in The New Yorker - but this (and Lehrer's claim that a bird is a mammal) made me question his other scientific claims.
I was also bored. But that almost seems by the by."
"Fantastic read - makes you want to go out and do some French cooking, read Mrs Dalloway, and look at some Cezanne paintings. It makes you appreciate both art and science more, and above all appreciate the miracle of our brain!"
"This book says a lot of fascinating things, but I can't escape the feeling that it is watered down science and simplified literary criticism. All in all, it is a good read with plenty of thought-provoking topics condensed into eight chapters. Not too challenging of a read, but it points to and references works that are more challenging and sheds some light on the ridiculousness of the "cultural divide" between sciences and humanities. The problem with this book,is that it assumes the popular take-away message about C.P. Snow's article. But an actual reading of that article reveals a different attitude: one of the role of science in industrialization and nuclear proliferation and the increasingly marginalized role of art/humanities in the world. C.P. Snow mostly bemoans the fact that "soft" humanists could not recite the second law of thermodynamics if you asked them to. Lehrer largely ignores this, as most of us who have heard of C.P. Snow do. He does make some beautiful points, however, and I am sure his call to arms for a "fourth culture" will not fall on deaf ears. I certainly felt inspired by this book, and by anyone who can explain Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as eloquently as he can explain Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." Take that, C.P. Snow!"
"I've read quickly through it when I borrowed it from the public library. I bought my own copy so I could take my time going through it a second time.
Taking a group of artists - a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists - Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering.
We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain's malleability; how the French chef Escoffier identified umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language - a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists.
It's the ultimate tale of art trumping science. More broadly, Lehrer shows that there's a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and this is what art knows better than science."
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